Zhou, H; Zhou, L; Gao, B; Huang, W; Huang, W; Zuo, J and Zhao, X (2025) Intelligent identification of risks in construction contract clauses based on semantic reasoning. Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 32(10), pp. 6593-6626. ISSN 0969-9988
Abstract
Purpose – The number of construction dispute cases has surged in recent years. The effective exploration and management of risks associated with construction contracts helps to directly enhance the overall project performance. The existing approaches to identify the risks associated with construction project contracts have a heavy reliance on manual review techniques, which are inefficient and highly restricted by personnel experience. The existing intelligent approaches only work for the contract query and storage. Hence, it is necessary to improve the intelligence level for contract risk management. This study aims to propose a novel method for the intelligent identification of risks in construction contract clauses based on natural language processing. Design/methodology/approach – This proposed method can formalize the linguistic logic and semantic information of contract clauses into multiple triples and transform the structural processing results of general clauses in a construction contract into rights and interests rules for risk review. In addition, the core semantic information of special clauses in a construction contract, rights and interests rules are used for semantic conflict detection. Finally, this study achieves the intelligent risk identification of construction contract clauses. Findings – The method is verified by selecting several construction contracts that had been applied in engineering contracting as a corpus. The results showed a high level of accuracy and applicability of the proposed method. Originality/value – This novel method can identify the risks in contract clauses with complex syntactic structures and realize rule extension according to the semantic relation network of the ontology. It can support efficient contract review and assist the decision-making process in contract risk management.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | construction contract; natural language processing; ontology; risk identification |
| Index terms: | construction contract, project performance, construction dispute, decision-making process, construction project, exploration, methodology, contract risk management, personnel, reasoning, ontology, accuracy, risk identification |
| Subjects: | dispute resolution, decision analysis, education and knowledge transfer, management, project management theory and practice, professional development, environmental resource management, contract type, cognitive psychology, research methods, production management, financial risk, contract management |
| Topics: | Cost Management, Research Practice, Information Management, Contract Administration, Human Resources, Risk Management, Procurement, Sustainability, Project Management, Legal Issues |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCT |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here